The opportunity to personalize features in a mobile vehicle is ever increasing as the automobile is being transformed into a communications and entertainment platform as well as a transportation platform. Many new cars will be installed with some type of telematics unit to provide wireless communication and location-based services. These services may be accessed through interfaces such as voice-recognition computer applications, touch-screen computer displays, computer keyboards, or a series of buttons on the dashboard or console of a vehicle.
Currently, telematics service call centers, in-vehicle compact disk (CD) or digital video display (DVD) media, web portals, and voice-enabled phone portals provide various types of location services, including driving directions, stolen vehicle tracking, traffic information, weather reports, restaurant guides, ski reports, road condition information, accident updates, street routing, landmark guides, and business finders.
For example, traffic and driving directions may be accessed through a voice portal that uses incoming number identification to generate location information based on the area code or prefix of the phone number, or to access location information stored in a user's profile associated with the phone number. Users may be prompted to enter more details through a voice interface. Other examples are web and wireless portals that offer location-based services such as maps and driving directions where the user enters both start and end addresses. Some of these services may have a voice interface.
Some users want to interface their personal portable wireless communication devices, such as cellular phones or PDAs with the telematics unit in order to access some of the telematics system features. With such an interface, the user can place their cell phone on the passenger seat and use the speaker system in the vehicle to talk on the cell phone. This interface also allows the user to access other the telematics features including dialing numbers one digit at a time, using a phonebook or contact list, accessing calendar appointments, storing data such as contact information, bookmarking radio stations and more.
Currently, a user can pay the up-front costs required to install the software and hardware for a permanent system to support a short-range wireless connection between the portable wireless communication device and telematics unit. The user pays up-front, since there is no currently established method to monitor the time usage of the short-range wireless connection with a telematics unit. If the user infrequently utilizes the short-range wireless connection feature, the cost for each usage is expensive for the user.
It is desirable, therefore, to offer the user a short-range wireless connection as a feature available within the software and hardware of the telematics unit that overcomes these and other disadvantages.